Evidence & Performance Blog

We recently covered the topic about dispersed and disparate data.
Within one company, if you have a horizontal view across all trials, you will notice that data is stored in various formats, including diverse relational databases, text files, XML files, spreadsheets and certainly proprietary storage formats. There is no unique way of collecting, organizing and analyzing data.
The problem is to utilize of this critical data to assess the trial’s or program’s performance.

What you need to efficiently measure the performance of your program is a unique type of storage that you could then query in a very efficient and time saving way: the metrics will be assessed on this unique model, generate homogeneous reports and ease decision-making.
That is where data integration takes all its meaning: the different sources will be combined in order to provide you with a unified view of your critical data.

Data integration solutions will be able to “connect” to your different source data (EDC output, IVRS, Safety data, Lab data, etc.). Once the data is integrated in this model, the metrics will be measured on it, and reports will be generated – standardized reports regardless the original output!
Think of the gain on time and professionalism: you could run reports for all studies, one dashboard similar to the next, in a couple of minutes, instead of spending days to manually create your report.

It appears that this dream is coming closer to reality! Thanks to services or applications that become a real interface between you, your providers and you performance management tool for example.
This kind of solution will use a standardized format, into which your providers will provide the data, and from which you and other tools, like indeed the performance management tool, will retrieve the critical data to assess the performance.

Data integration systems already exist for other domains like finance. Over the past decade it appears that it is possible in this domain. Now it is up to us to make it happen in the clinical area.

Our goal is to create a workgroup with some, if not all, of you. Together in the workgroup we will discuss first of all the needs, establish some specifications and standardized interfaces – which you might have encountered in other domains –, so that clinical data integration becomes reality!